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Case Study: Online Reward Redemption Takes Off for Aimia

Aimia wanted to become a global leader in loyalty management by expanding their loyalty program and promoting non-air rewards such as electronics, consumer goods and experiential gifts and indulgences which would be offered through an expanding eco-system of partners.
Also, with the majority of member interaction being transactional, a stronger online
experience would help shift members towards a self-service model in order to improve customer service. Customers would have the convenience to redeem their Aeroplan Miles online at any time. This would alleviate traffic and cost for the Aimia customer service division.
The IT team at Aimia wanted to retain as much control of the system in-house as
possible to avoid being locked into any proprietary technology that would limit their
ability to upgrade future components. This required an ecommerce platform that would fit into their existing IT infrastructure, be flexible to take on unique requirements such as amalgamating hundreds of partner products into a single catalog, and provide multi-lingual capabilities to serve their members in both French and English.
Initially, Aimia evaluated 30 ecommerce vendors, narrowing the list to three finalists to conduct extensive Proof of Concept studies. While other candidate applications were prohibitively expensive, unfavorably proprietary, or difficult to implement, they found the flexibility and scalability of the Elastic Path solution to be an ideal fit.
“When we evaluated Elastic Path we thought it was too good to be true, no red flags,” said Sean Burke-Gaffney, Web Development Manager, Aeroplan. “We didn’t want a duct-tape solution, we wanted a round peg for a round hole.” Elastic Path provided the exacting architectural fit, while also fitting Aimia’s budget.